Blood On My Hands
by Eyesinthenight102
Summary: Mulan weighs her feelings for Aurora, and realizes that some stories were never meant to have happy endings. (AU Enchanted Forest) Rated T for blood


Mulan lay the corpse of a dead hare on a flat rock by the campfire. The tiny body was long and lean, nearly devoid of meat, but bloody and freshly killed. It was the only prey she had been able to find this close to the Dark Castle. The fortress loomed above, cradled like an egg in the rocky mountain passes. Cloaked in snow, its high walls held an air of foreboding. The dark tendrils of Malificent's taint still soiled the earth here, and it didn't take a practiced hunter to see that the land was suffering.

Fell magic poisoned the springs of water that once flowed fresh from the glacial outcroppings, and neither bird nor beast dared stay in the territory for long. The soil was barely fertile enough to allow a thin layer of wind-blown scrub brush to take hold. Nothing could live in this desolate wasteland any longer. What was once vibrant and verdant was now dead and scoured clean.

Even the memories of this place felt raw and soured.

Dumb luck and almost a full fletch of arrows were the only things that had managed to ensure a satiation to the empty rumblings in the bellies of the princess and the warrior over the past few days. But their infinite wellspring of fortune was running dry along with their supplies. Stalking and killing today's dinner had taken hours, but for Mulan, the return to camp had come much too soon.

Her dark eyes stayed pinned to the tiny furry body as she grabbed for the curved well-worn handle of her hunting knife. She gritted her teeth, preparing herself for the unsavory hurdle of the next task: skinning the creature for supper. Pointedly ignoring the disapproving gaze of her campmate, she whetted the blade.

Hunters had to eat. _Such is the way of the world here_, she mused. _Kill or be killed_. There were some things that could be, and others that could not.

The thought sat coldly in the pit of her chest, weighing on her heart. Rabbits could not live, lest her belly remain empty. Her love for Aurora could not flourish, lest she break her vow to her prince.

Stolid and sick realization clawed its way up into her, and she swallowed hard. Love was a disease, and it was killing her slowly.

"You're avoiding me." Aurora spoke, breaching the silence. Her tone, Mulan noted, hinged somewhere between challenge and accusatory. The statement rang with hard truth, but the warrior didn't care. She pretends as if the words are unheard.

"Why?"

The question fell again on deaf ears.

Mulan's forehead wrinkled, '_Why should she care? She's in love with Phillip anyways…and I am nothing to her. I never could be._' Despair made her bones feel heavy and cold. She chased it away with the white-heat of indignation and pent up rage. The flames of her frustration were borne of her heart's deepest sorrows.

Deep folds etched themselves into her face with the intensity of her concentration. Dark eyes grew steely and dead as she sliced into the creature's belly, blood spurting from the gash. She gutted the carcass on the rock, ripping into it with a sick tearing sound. The intestines she wrenched out with her fist, slopping them on the ground and hastily burying them to hide the scent from other feral beasts who might envy her hard-won prize.

Across the campsite, Aurora blanched and looked away, suddenly losing any desire to eat.

"Something the matter, princess?" Mulan spat, her rage making her body tremble as she vented her irritation on the flayed cadaver of the hare. Blood was spattered across her cheek, clotted and cooling, making her look half mad. _This_, Mulan thought with a sick satisfied disgust, _was the face of who she was_—a warrior. Reeking of entrails, soaked in blood, and empty of empathy.

She was a weapon, trained and honed for use. There could be no room for soft emotions such as adoration and amour.

Aurora's eyes flashed at the unexpected brutality she saw in her friend's clenched and corded muscles. Something was deeply wrong…this was not the woman she had come to know over the past few months. The normal warmth of Mulan's cocoa brown eyes was replaced with a void of nothingness, her pupils yawned like empty pits, rimmed with irises of hard-hearted hate. This stranger was someone the princess did not recognize. A villainous killer cloaked in her friend's form.

Aurora's perfect brows arched down at the spitting mockery the warrior had made of her title. The princess's rage flared unexpectedly, simpering like pot about to overflow. If there was one thing that Aurora hated beyond all others, it was to be treated like a petty little girl. Dismissed and ignored. Hot fury roiled just below the surface of her skin, and she could feel her face grow warm with it. She had to remind herself to keep her emotions in check, lest her tongue get the best of her.

"You still haven't answered my question."

"My duty is not to answer questions, princess. My duty is to protect you. Nothing more." The warrior gritted out. Her eyes were hard and dead. She slashed again at the carcass, praying distantly that she could cut her own feelings from her chest just as easily as she could cleave the rabbit's organs away. Buried in the sand, and left to rot.

Aurora jerked her head back, as if the sting of the words had done a physical hurt. Open astonishment and confusion painted themselves across her fair visage as the cutting nature of the verbal slap sunk in.

"But….but I thought…You and I were more than that. I thought you were my_ friend_." The princess's voice wavered and broke, balefully hitching on the last word.

Mulan hated herself. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying as she heard the crack in Aurora's throaty warble. Guilt and self-loathing slid like tangled eels, twisting and writhing in her heart. The warrior knew she was the cause of the princess's pain.

_It's all my fault_.

Mentally, she chided herself scathingly in hopes of raising the ire inside. She searched her soul, desperate to rekindle the vestiges of torrid hate that burned away all other sensations. Rage was so much easier. It blazed dark and all consuming; better than the slow agony poisoning her heart every time she found herself close to the princess. Every time they touched, laughed and shared supper the venom's hold grew deeper. Every time they slept near each other on cold winter nights to huddle against the cold, the toxin twisted blackly, eating her heart from the inside out.

Hate was easier than love.

She berated herself cruelly, her thoughts vile and mocking in her own head.

_She should have known better than to meddle with the princess, she should have never made her promise to Phillip. All this time she should have stayed distant and aloof. She never expected that Aurora would be so true, kind, and gentle._

She'd never expected to fall in love.

"No. We're not." The words tore themselves hatefully from the warrior's throat. "I made a promise to Phillip. That is all. You are a princess and I…I am a soldier. We could never be friends…or anything else. "

Soft gasps and sobs spilled from the princess. Aurora bit her lip, trying to silence the breaking of her heart, but to no avail. The tears flowed freely, cutting hot runnels across her cheeks and falling on the infertile dusty ground. Mulan did not turn. Afraid to look at the damage her words had wrought. She kept her eyes clenched shut, blocking out all sound and pretending as if her own spirit wasn't shattering with the broken sound of the princess's weeping.

Rabbit's blood trickled over her palms, and she wiped them in the dirt, trying to smear away the stains of what she had done. Inside Mulan felt nearly as cold as the peaks that frowned down upon her, dark and distant with their implacable stony faces. The warrior found herself wishing she were as dead as the rabbit that lay at her feet.


End file.
